My brother,
unravel your fist.
Part your lips and taste
bittersweet oxygen;
Breathe in sin
and lust and sore eyes
and Lover’s skin
and the crushed aspirin on
Her bedside
one-night
stand.
Taste the sharp-edged thrill of
Medicine,
let it make your head spin
like when children wove
Wind and Sky with cobalt
threads of moonlight
and hummingbird hands.
I can see it in your eyes,
they pray like the curling fingertips
of tidal waves, and I am
here to tell you,
You
are not alone.

I’ve seen men with canyons
cut across their face;
deep and sad and dirtied
with their grandfather’s gunpowder.

I’ve seen men who’ve blacked-out
their irises with full-feathered crows
whose toes curl from the corners
to catch drops of their
Oceans
and hide them where ‘real men’
stow theirs:
In the bottom of a bottle,
“Boy” they say,
“drink every **** drop
‘till that pain goes away.”
These are the same men who
read ghost hieroglyphics
and practice bed-sheet rhetoric
that lingers longer than
certain cases of Cancer.

My brother,
you’ve lived too many starless nights
in this era of broken jaws
and bitten lips.
I am a twenty-year-old,
sleep-deprived daylight dreamer,
naïve enough to still
believe in true love, but
even I’ve really lived life
at least once,
or twice.
I’ve learned that the purest gold,
pink and orange burn
in Mountain West sunsets.
I’ve learned that it takes a long time
to find your way home
when all you keep
wrapped beneath this skin is bone.
So turn to the sky.
Constellations pedal everything from
Prophesies to pipedreams
and the only thing that’s constant
is the direction
North.

Today, I plan on catching hummingbirds.
I kissed open the face
of a dusty, old pocket watch
which I adopted from
a bent-spined,
curbside Saint
on the corner of First and Main
in exchange of the cure
for cracked vertebrae
and an honest conversation.
I clogged its clicking gears
with precious stones
to induce a temporary comatose,
so we’ve got until the
backwards time it takes
to grind diamonds into coal dust
to string those beating wings,
feathers and fluttering heartbeats
to the weathered backside
of our palms.
Brother, I want you to come with me.
Bring your chipped,
white porcelain bathtub
We’ll drag it to the coast.
Forget about that diamond powder,
there’s plenty laced in the sea.
We’ll spell out our goodbyes
in the lines our feet leave in the sand;
messages that will only be
read by free hands,
who find the courage to cross them.
By the tail-end of dusk,
We’ll tear clouds from this overhead
Mosaic,
and moonbeam-stitch them
to head winds and comet tails.
Together
we’ll sail this makeshift porcelain vessel
to the Eighth Sea.

I’ve heard,
from folklore and
childhood bedtime stories,
that long ago
Wise men with bare toes,
grass-stained knees
and arthritic elbows
mapped out the sky
on the ocean floor there.
It’s said,
they whispered the secret
to the man in the moon
before he was silenced
by mathematics and meteorites.
a secret that
only the guy with a
three-point belt overheard,
so scour the sharp bedrock with me
because I can see the need
to feel the crunch of autumn
alpine leaves
beneath your feet.
Read the contour lines of the sky
magnified by ripples and
a pulsing tide that sings hymns
about desert winds and cactus thorns.
take a deep breath
once more
before we begin;
fill your lungs with all the beauties
of Human Pollution.
Let your dizzy vision
spin with the pale-blue winds,
which will blow us to
a decrepit island,
that once was a burning star.

Because I need you to navigate.

I’ve been there once before,
but I can’t remember the way.
All I recall was
hitch-hiking with the ghost greens
of Aurora’s borealis,
and an ancient Man
with marked knees,
calloused toes
and cracking elbows
who, with frail voice, told me:
“From the curve of the moon
sewn to the tune of hummingbird wings,
you’ll find what you’re looking for.
But when you’ve discovered it, come back to this
canyoned skin and brittle bone.
Because Orion and I are trying to find
a reason to follow the North Star back
Home."

I gave it up for lent
or whatever went before
and I don't think it anymore
well not so's you'd notice
but if a kiss is just a kiss
why do I miss it so?
Ah
old men and pipedreams
where it all seems so long ago
and long ago is where the old folk go
to talk their tales.

The outlaw Josey Wales had no time for that
flat out on the badlands with his big sixguns in two big hands
I wish I were him
life here is grim
like in a Northern town
where the Moon rises and never goes down
where the Sun can't be found
and daylight never touches the ground
and the soot is something we cook with.

I give notice here and now that somewhere,somehow
I will shine
or sail off in a dhow to no man's land
and will my life away in a shotgun shell
Life here is hell.

I
in my instability cannot see
what's in front of me
and irrationally
I think I'm in a bind
blind to all these other things that this good life brings
but not wise enough or even tough enough to tough it out.

About ten o-clock
when I have taken stock and the food is running low
I go again to the corner shop where I take a pop at Majid and his fancy prices
I tell him rice grows in the paddy fields
he yields and lets me off for sixpence.
I feel so grand as if he'd broken wind and kissed my hand
and now I go
before the police arrive
can't survive on bread and water
ask my daughter
she feeds me when I hunger for
chop suey from the Chinese store.

All this with just one thought
one kiss
I ramble on
Life has gone and passed me by
I try with *****,coke
a smoke or two
and it doesn't do it
life here is ****
but I remember down the pit with props and pony
only I could tolerate
second rate is what I got
not a lot but it will do
until the life I have is through
but had I been the outlaw Wales
I would have told such different tales
and life is but a coffin full of nails
awaiting on the hammer.

Seems to me I am doing something wrong,
Terribly wrong to the birthday cakes you
Ate and bikes that broke your spine, but
Spaceless words leave me with pipedreams,
Three years, long and gone but it's not easy
To quit binoculars, I always watch over you,
Obsess over the voiceless words and
Movies I did not understand but I know that
I will keep chasing unless one day you
Pop out of that lousy little town. One day.

At sixteen, I was easily impressed with conversations of tattoos, septum rings, and pipedreams that internal biases created a tendency to wonder if you’d smoke those too in the art room.
When you spoke of the desire for a “creation of Adam painting to be inked across the canvas of your arm.”
I was enchanted though, unaware my embrace and unorthodox philosophy of loving the dead back to life would never work; I mourned in consumption of you and remained in a ramshackle shelter where we had class together.

An oxymoron, truly.

There was something sinister that washed down the room's rusted sink than your murky paint water. Every day, as if on schedule I lamented the opening of my veins in preparation for the inevitable.
You re-arranged yours with the help of a syringe and my mind questioned how best to save your life.
The focus of my grief was full of wonder in who would die first, but at least loved.
I began to know, the meaning of fixation so well, my lips tasted different even a shared laugh felt pathetic, but not as much as knowing neither of us could drive.
I became your girlfriend Suicide, experienced and immersed in toxicity.
I hated myself so passionately in undoing myself so vigorously all in act of loving you.
Breaths were not allowed unless you said so.
My world became the word "sorry"- your prevalent command, love should not make you guilty in having a heart that beats.
But it was like a ******* thunderstorm when you opened your mouth,
"Are there are any tats you want?"
  I remember you asked.

Today, I am aware of just how little I knew what I wanted.
I had sworn it was my mother's birthdate in Roman numerals, you disapproved and all in the spirit of mourning... I compensated and titled every poem about you in a similar fashion with the day we met,
but these journals had become a grave and shared spaces a graveyard.
Until sixteen, I was incapable of understanding this kind of ache.
I lied to myself,
that the mourning ceased in this season of my life, worse- I was your Adam.

An everlong ache.
I wish it had put me in my place because I did practically the same, instead of just blades that dug in
like your dulled needles, the pain felt in awareness never was. Always so obedient.
You held that deflated balloon filled with ****** over my head every moonless night in your mother's apartment.
I had to have known to beg was not love.
This was worship, utterly painful,
I recognize the role I have long feared as a martyr.
Your claim that I had made you so sad you couldn't feel anything became an incapacity for me though,
the sacrifices made in justifying broken things
function with the belief of no reparations are needed
and rather everyone should be as broken as you are.

You taught me the bruises from your crooked teeth landscaping my throat were entitlement.
Ownership.
These colors upon my flesh never meant you needed me.
You never wanted me, adamant you deserved me.
I was of convenience. This pain gave me something.
You were responsible for my rebirth, shut the door.
Another door opened that revealed who you are, rather another scar canvassing my body that I live with the intent of tattooing over.

A soliloquy of disharmony from the maimed-unnamed soldier foretells so well
that the rhapsodic roar of war is a chorus of the purist gore from the chaotic choir of hell.
This is for You who betray the universal truth
of love,
death
and youth.
How dare you preach of ceaseless peace when the peace you reach for
Is beseeched by deceased chess pieces upon the beach floor.
Naive but brave boyish pawns with their heads and their knees in the sand,
who faithfully faced the hellfire that razed their grandiose last stand
into the scorched nightmare-land for your abyss-seducing plan.
Not even the darkest Devil in hell could quell the ****** surging swell.
They’re the lost stanzas of a forgotten symphony
conducted within the cacophony of a coffins divinity,
the pawn pieces on a puppet string whose grip they can’t untwine
from the very least among us;
the desirous tyrants with their puppet-master minds.
If their dark fantasies should not cease to feast upon the nature of the beast,
better to betray the bark of false amity lest the hex of vanity refuses to decay,
as the trivialised archetype of destruction is the civilised man of modern day
who is sleeping on his sanity with eyes of pride brightly wide awake.
With pipedreams of eternal peace at the feet of our blood-stained door,
visioning winning with a checkmate or a dead queen on the floor.
Only when the once wilting wild-flowers grow free through the cracks in the board,
will we see through the eye of the beholder the first morn of the freely dreamed dawn.
And in fairness to the youth, whom uncouthly search for truth,
with their own dreams that gleam of drinking water from fresh streams,
sleeping in a meadow of bliss beneath the bereaved stars.
Their time has finally come to strike in the nail of change,
to see the coffin lowered with the ageing ancient ways,
but we can’t have faith in change lest its paved the saviours way